Marrow, Cleva

ORAL HISTORY OF CLEVA MARROW
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
August 10, 2013
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is August 10, 2013, and I am at the home of Cleva Marrow here in Oak Ridge. Mrs. Marrow, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MRS. MARROW: Happy to have you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning. Why don't you tell me about where you were born and raised, something about your family.
MRS. MARROW: I was born and raised in western Kentucky in an area called the Jackson Purchase, which is extreme western part of the state, that little narrow part between the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Tennessee rivers, about an eight county area. Born on a farm in Graves County, Kentucky, which was near a farming village called Farmington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: I lived there until I was eleven and went through sixth grade at the elementary school in the village. And then... This was during the Great Depression, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, ma'am.
MRS. MARROW: My father had to quit farming actively himself when I was about six and had been working with a road paving contractor. And, in fact, he paved some of the first roads in Western Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year... if you don't mind me asking, what year were you born?
MRS. MARROW: 1922.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1922... Ok.
MRS. MARROW: August.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So he was working with a road paving company?
MRS. MARROW: Yes. And, just one way and another with the Depression he couldn't keep up with the payments on the farm so we lost the farm and moved into the county seat when I was eleven years old. I was very upset about the move. (laughs) And -- it wasn't a joke at the time, but it's a joke now, we had never had indoor plumbing so we had indoor plumbing for the first time, and I said, "I'm not going to use that. I'm never going to go there." (laughter) But, of course, I did later.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: We moved to town about six weeks before the city schools there hadn't finished. So, I was so determined that I wouldn't be held back, you know, a grade because of coming from a county, country school that I enrolled and I went to school the last six weeks of sixth grade at the elementary... yes, it was elementary still there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: So, I lived there until I graduated from high school, Mayfield High School as a salutatorian.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second. I want to make an adjustment real quick. Ok, I'm sorry... So, we're going to pick it back up with, you said you had ... you graduated high school from Mayfield.
MRS. MARROW: Mayfield High School...
MR. MCDANIEL: As the salutatorian.
MRS. MARROW: Salutatorian of my class and that same year, I guess I... They had competitive contests in different subjects and that year I won first in literature in the state of Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well, I'm going to have to ask... hold on just a second. I'm sorry, I'm not happy with that either. We'll pick right back up with that same spot. I'll just put it back where it was. So, why don't you just start with, "I graduated from Mayfield High School..."
MRS. MARROW: I graduated from Mayfield High School as salutatorian of my class. That same year I won the contest, First in Literature in the state of Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right. What did you have to do? Did you have to write an essay or...?
MRS. MARROW: Write essays and then took some tests for that. I would say living in town after growing up in the country was quite a change for me. And I don't think I ever thoroughly adjusted to it. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. MARROW: But during those years, too, my father had -- as the Depression deepened, the contracting company was having difficulties -- and he ended up working for the WPA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And so, when I graduated from high school, my mom and I moved to Madison... no, Benton, Kentucky, which is near Land Between the Lakes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok, sure...
MRS. MARROW: We lived there because he was, by that time, now had changed again and he was working for Packard Motor Company up in Detroit making airplane engines. So, until I married, my mom and I lived together in an apartment in Benton and then moved to Paducah when I went to work at Kentucky Ordinance Works in 1942. I guess I skipped a little bit here.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok, we'll go back. Why don't you get a drink? Your voice is...
MRS. MARROW: It's really getting scratchy, isn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: A little scratchy...There we go. That's fine!
MRS. MARROW: It's going to continue to...
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok...
MRS. MARROW: Did that help any? Not much...
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, I think you'll be fine.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok. So…
MRS. MARROW: Oh, talking about going to Kentucky Ordinance Works is what it was. After I graduated high school, I got a scholarship to a small school in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, called Bethel Women's College. I always have been so -- I've thought about this so many times -- I've been so grateful to the efforts that my dad made for me. He was working for the WPA and he paid for my college education which, of course, the tuition was very low back in those years, which was '42, plus I did have a scholarship. Every month he sent a check for $33 to the college to pay for my two years there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: It was a junior college. I graduated in '42, and then that same summer I went to work for Kentucky Ordinance Works in Paducah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, $33 in '42, was nothing to sneeze at either. Doesn't sound like much, but it was a lot of money back then. Especially if you weren't making very much.
MRS. MARROW: That's right. It was a good little piece of what he was earning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: So, I've always been so grateful for those sacrifices he made for me to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you graduated from Bethel...
MRS. MARROW: In 1942.
MR. MCDANIEL: In '42 and you went to work?
MRS. MARROW: Went to work at Kentucky Ordinance Works.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what was that?
MRS. MARROW: That was a plant that made -- they were manufacturing TNT for conventional bombs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, right. And was that in Paducah?
MRS. MARROW: That was just outside Paducah. In fact, later the gaseous diffusion plant took in that same land where the ordnance works was, west of Paducah a little bit. But it was while ... I worked as a secretary because I'd gotten a degree in... associate degree in business administration, worked as a secretary there. And it was at that time I met my husband because he was ... Out of college he had been hired by Atlas Powder Company and had trained at Weldon Springs, Missouri, and Kankakee, Illinois, and some of the other installations before coming to Paducah to run a TNT line.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MRS. MARROW: I met him at a cafeteria dance. They had the cafeteria dances on Saturday nights and I met him in, I guess, in '43, at a cafeteria dance. So we stared dating regularly and in the spring, late winter, I guess it was, of '44, he decided that ... He'd always loved ships and he decided that he was going to volunteer for the Navy. So he went up to St. Louis to do all of the interview work and the exams and that kind of thing and he passed everything except his medical because he had a double curvature of the spine and they said he'd never be able to handle deck duty. So, when he came back to Paducah, he was still looking to leave there so he had heard about the work in Oak Ridge and he decided to apply down here. He came down on May 5th and went to work on May 6th. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? In '44?
MRS. MARROW: In '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Well, I stayed in Paducah. We got unofficially engaged, but I stayed in Paducah because he had to wait until he could get married housing. But I visited him and saw Oak Ridge for the first time on the 4th of July weekend. I rode a bus 14 hours for an overnight trip. I had my first experience going through the guard gates and stayed overnight at the Guest House. I got my engagement ring and fainted in the jewelry store, all on that first day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: George was living in a dorm in West Village and had to wait 'til we could get housing and so... We waited until he knew that he had housing lined up before we set our wedding date which was August 31, 1944. We went on a week's honeymoon to Gatlinburg and then we came back to Oak Ridge at the end of the first week in September to a one-bedroom apartment on Waddell Circle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, wow.
MRS. MARROW: So that's how we set up housekeeping.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it was '44...
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And the apartment was so new, the construction was so new the floors were sanded, but they still were not finished.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yep. So, we had no furniture and, in fact, even our bed linens -- a lot of them were wedding gifts -- had been in the trunk of the car and they were stolen while we were in Gatlinburg.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my!
MRS. MARROW: So we rented a rolling bed, two straight chairs and some linens from Roane-Anderson Company which was managing the city for the government at that time, and set up housekeeping in this little one-bedroom apartment. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Now, did he... where did he work? Did he work at Y-12?
MRS. MARROW: I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Your husband...
MRS. MARROW: ... the first nine months I was married...
MR. MCDANIEL: Your husband.
MRS. MARROW: Pardon me?
MR. MCDANIEL: Your husband? Where did he...?
MRS. MARROW: Oh, my husband worked at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, he was hired by Tennessee Eastman.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So, y'all moved... you're newly married, new town, new living arrangement, new everything.
MRS. MARROW: It was an exciting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right.
MRS. MARROW: I spent the first nine months learning how to cook, learning how to be married ... (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course. (laughs)
MRS. MARROW: ...and getting used to that. And then I started work in April of 1945 and I worked at Y-12 until Tennessee Eastman closed... 'til the government closed down the calutron operations and Tennessee Eastman left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did you do at Y-12?
MRS. MARROW: I worked at one of the Alpha buildings and I was... the job was called, at the time, a spot checker. Now, we would call them a quality control technician probably. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: But actually what I did was to read the cubicle meters twice every shift and then I went back to the office, which was on the floor above the cubicle rooms, and crunched the numbers and did calculations and forwarded those on to the central office that was gathering statistics from all the operations from the calutrons. So my purpose was to read those meters and see what the production of U-235 was, really.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And then, when ... before Eastman left, I had had the opportunity to take a secretarial job and I was secretary to the production superintendent in Beta 3 which was, you know, one of the operations to further refine uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: Speaking about that, knowing or not knowing what you were doing. Of course, I did not know what I was doing when I was reading those meters except that I was gathering information.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: But, sometime in the early period after we were married, my husband and I went over to the University of Tennessee library and he got a certain issue of the New York Times which talked a lot about Franklin Roosevelt's interest in the heavy water experiments that had been going on in Germany and some additional information, so we had a hint of what might be happening, but we never talked about it anymore even among... between the two of us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So I was still working for Waldo England as his secretary in Beta 3 when they decided to close down the calutron operation and Tennessee Eastman left and a lot of people including myself were out of a job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: Because employment went way down at that point. So I interviewed at X-10 and was hired in there to be secretary to the project engineer. Monsanto Chemical was the contractor at X-10 at the time. That was an exciting time, too. They were just beginning the planning to try to build a national laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And the project engineer was deep into that. So I had the experience of being involved in the very early stages of that planning and took notes for a lot of those meetings when they were planning.
MR. MCDANIEL: When they were figuring out how to turn it into a national laboratory.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And, in fact, I can remember very well they spoke of it as a national laboratory along the lines of the Bell Labs up near Chicago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: We lived in that apartment from... Well, let me go back for just a moment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: It turns out that when I went to work for Monsanto at X-10 I was pregnant, but I didn't know it at the time. So I worked until I was about six months in my pregnancy and then I resigned. And we lived in that apartment until shortly before my oldest daughter was born in '47.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: We moved to a B house on Pacific Road and we lived in that B house from '47 to 1954. And that was at the time when the city was... I mean the government was deciding to divest itself of the properties and sell them. If you lived in a cemesto, or, I guess, other housing you had first option for buying that property. But we already had one child. In fact, by '54, we had two and another one on the way, so we needed more room than a two-bedroom B house. So, we decided that we would use our priority to purchase a lot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: It was a bidding system for these lots up in the east end of town, which was the first land sold for private development. The area had formerly been flat-tops and this was the first area of flat-tops that were removed for the sale. And, A few lots were leased prior to the sale, but we waited. We bid on three lots up here and got our third choice.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really.
MRS. MARROW: I think that was 1954. So we moved out of the B house and lived in a house on the lower end of East Drive which was a newer rental development, that had been recently built and was being managed by Frrtz-Hays-Ballard and that's where we lived while we planned this house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: So we worked with an engineer and an architect to plan a lay-out... to do the plans for this house...
MR. MCDANIEL: This house that we're in today?
MRS. MARROW: This house that we are in. Moved in to it on Memorial Day, 1959 and have been here ever since! (laughter) Now, interesting enough, I'm sure we're not alone in this either, but in the early days of our marriage we thought we'd just be here until the war was over.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And instead, we just kept staying because it was a good place to live.
MR. MCDANIEL: By this time you had three kids... well, I mean, in the '50s. But you ended up with... how many? Did you just have the three children?
MRS. MARROW: I have four. I had a fourth while we were living in the house on the lower end of East Drive before we... He was 13 months old when we moved into this house. There was something I thought of a moment ago and I wanted to go back. You'll edit this, I know.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, we just go straight through. That's OK.
MRS. MARROW: Oh, I know what it was. It was the business of being here all this time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: We turned down about four opportunities to leave! (laughter) One... The first place we considered going was down to Peru to work for Anaconda Copper. We'd have been way up in the mountains and way different...
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow! When was this? About when was that?
MRS. MARROW: This was, let's see... This was probably around the time that Tennessee Eastman, or just before they left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Didn't know what you were going to do.
MRS. MARROW: No, but then we discovered that I was pregnant with my first child and so that knocked that out of the way because of amenities, probably, up on a mountain, down in Peru.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. MARROW: And another time, George was offered an opportunity to ... No, I guess the next one was that he looked into leaving Oak Ridge to work for Mobil Oil.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: In fact, they offered him a job and, in the end, we decided to stay here, again. Later, when Union Carbide had the contract for Y-12, they, at one point, offered him a job to go with the private Carbon Division. And he decided not to do that. Again, it was because we had a child that was in psychotherapy…
MR. MCDANIEL: Care...
MRS. MARROW: Behavioral treatment here at UT and we decided that moving wasn't a good move to make. The last time we had an offer and thought about leaving Oak Ridge was to go with the Consumer Products Division in Tarrytown, New York. George looked at the living conditions and so on up there and decided that wasn't a good move either, so we stayed here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But we had some great, great years. During all that time, as I said in talking with you before we started this, the filming. We were all young together; we were all from somewhere else. There were a lot of facilities that were very, very... made this a very good place to live. Neighborhood shopping centers, public cafeterias and a cafe, four or five movie theaters, bowling alleys. The fly in the ointment, of course, in those years was the rationing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly. But that was everywhere, though, wasn't it? I mean, rationing was everywhere.
MRS. MARROW: Rationing was everywhere. Here, too! I remember standing in line and with ... long lines, for meat and for other items. You got to the point where if you saw a line, you got in it. (laughs) But you didn't ever have any assurance they were going to still have any when you got to the front of the line.
MR. MCDANIEL: What were some of the things that were rationed, generally? You said meat...
MRS. MARROW: Fuel, gasoline was rationed. My husband, they had a kind of alphabetical system for gas rationing. I've forgotten what the lowest level was, but they used B, I know was for people that worked in the military industries.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And if you had a B rating you got eight gallons a month.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. Of course, automobiles themselves were rationed, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: Again, because of the work that George was doing he was able to have a car. And sugar. I think it was a half-pound per person a month, I believe. And coffee was rationed also. That was also rationed on an individual basis and I remember that what your ration that you received had to last you for five weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: A lot of the other foodstuffs were rationed. Refrigerators were rationed. Bicycles were rationed. Tires were rationed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: Fats -- butter, shortening, and so on. Those were all rationed. So, as I joked -- half-joking -- with someone not long ago, as far as meats were concerned, you were lucky if you knew somebody that knew a black market butcher.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: And, strangely enough, we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MRS. MARROW: At one point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MRS. MARROW: The couple that lived on... The K apartments were on the circle where we had our first home. The other one-bedroom apartment in that complex -- there were four apartments in it, two were two-bedroom and two one-bedroom -- the couple in the other one-bedroom apartment were a couple from Elizabethton, Tennessee, and they knew an ex-national... major league baseball catcher by the name of Hobe Brummit who was then a butcher over in Knoxville and they took me with them one time to see him and I once bought black market meat. And there was also a little butchery -- butcher shop -- on Hardin Valley Road, not far down Hardin Valley Road on the west side near where Pellissippi Community College is and we used to go over there, too, but that was legal it's just that it was a place that sometimes had a supply when the grocery stores here in Oak Ridge did not.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was it all meats or was it just good meats. I mean, could you get like processed meats like bologna and things such as that?
MRS. MARROW: No, they were all rationed, too. As well as fresh cut meats.
MR. MCDANIEL: What about the cafeterias here in town. Were they able to get it before individuals were?
MRS. MARROW: Presumably they were, but I don't know for sure, but presumably they did have some priorities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, exactly...
MRS. MARROW: Because, you know, by '45, probably, the population here was 75,000.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. Yeah, there was a lot of people here.
MRS. MARROW: And a lot of people ate in the cafeterias. We did, too, part of the time. There was one cafe and it was located in what is now called the Capiello Building and I have an idea the Capiellos may have owned it. It was called the T&C and it was right in the section where, just to the left, in fact, the Epicurian may have included, I mean that space.
MR. MCDANIEL: Kind of in the middle there.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, but... The corner, there are two divisions there is so divided there. I know the first two and probably the third one, too, was part of the T&C. I'm pretty sure the Capiellos maybe owned them. But it was not government run like the cafeterias were. As you know, probably, we do still have one of the original movie theaters here. It was the Ridge Theater that is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was the Center Theater.
MRS. MARROW: Was it the Center?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was the Center. The Ridge was the one that was down next to where Big Ed's is. But it was the Center Theater where the Playhouse...
MRS. MARROW: Ok, that's right. My mistake.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok!
MRS. MARROW: My memory's...
MR. MCDANIEL: But you had four! You had Jefferson, Grove, the Center and the Ridge.
MRS. MARROW: That's right. The boardwalks, I was just mentioning a minute ago the neighborhood shopping centers and, of course, neighborhood schools.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And you can't talk about Oak Ridge in the early days without talking about the mud, but at the same time a very nice feature was the fact that we did have those neighborhood centers and we had boardwalks through the woods that took us to those centers so that you could walk.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And, of course, you couldn't drive everywhere anyway because of the gas rationing and so on. We went in to, during those early years anyway; we went in to Knoxville almost every Saturday night. We were, of course, we were looking for furniture. Because, I mentioned what we started out with, so we had to shop for furniture.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: First thing we did was, we bought a bedroom suite at the old Miller's.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And I still have it. It's in the middle bedroom here at home here.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was the one down on Henley Street?
MRS. MARROW: It was on Gay Street.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Gay Street.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And so, it sat in the living room ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Go right ahead...
MRS. MARROW: ... while George finished the floors in the bedroom! (laughs) And then before he got the living room floors finished he had an emergency appendectomy and went down to the Oak Ridge Hospital which was, of course, as I'm sure you know, operated by the government and all the staff were -- at least the medical... the doctors were all military...
MR. MCDANIEL: Military... sure.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. So he had his ruptured appendix removed and, I don't remember how many days he was there, but a few days, then he just walked out of the hospital without it costing a single cent.
MR. MCDANIEL: So his appendix ruptured?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. But he didn't... they got to it very early ...
MR. MCDANIEL: That was one of the great things about living in Oak Ridge is the hospital, wasn't it?
MRS. MARROW: Yes, it was one of the great things about it. And there were other things... Another great thing about living in Oak Ridge was that coal was delivered to your door and it didn't matter too much that it was soft coal and belched smoke all over your laundry if it was hanging. But that was a great benefit, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And I don't remember... if we ever paid an electric bill up now to incorporation or the city, I don't remember it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember it.
MR. MCDANIEL: You probably didn't.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. So that was nice. And the fact that you never, as long as the city was gated you never, ever... We never locked a door.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Until the gates were opened. I remember that occasion very well, in 1949, too. I remember Jack Bailey. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Who was one of the celebrities who came.
MR. MCDANIEL: He did Queen for a Day.
MRS. MARROW: Queen for a Day. And Marie "The Body" McDonald.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. MARROW: And there was another one...
MR. MCDANIEL: Rob Cameron, Rob, he was the cowboy.
MRS. MARROW: There was another female, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, Marie "The Body" McDonald... Jeanette...? Was it Jeanette something or other? I should know. I made a movie about it, "The Day They Opened the Gates"...
MRS. MARROW: I know it's somewhere in my notes but right now it's gone out of my head... But anyway... That was a great day, in a way, and another day that we dreaded, in a way, because the fact that we had been such a secure community.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: So, you know, you make some trade-offs. Yeah, you make some trade-offs...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...And that was in 1949.
MRS. MARROW: '49, yeah. When did we incorporate finally?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was ...1959 is when the vote was taken, and then in '60 was when it actually...
MRS. MARROW: The first time it failed.
MR. MCDANIEL: The first time it failed, yes. And then it actually passed in '59 and, I think, in 1960 is when it officially started. You know, they spent a year getting everything together, getting it ready.
MRS. MARROW: Of course, other great things about those early days was the fact that we had a community... a symphony orchestra very early composed of many of the scientists, some others that were not, perhaps, but mostly the scientists that lived here. I think Waldo Cohn was the first director.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was. He was the first director.
MRS. MARROW: "Kahn"?
MR. MCDANIEL: "Cone"... I think it's "Cone"...Now, so did you and your...? Were you and your husband used to, you know, the cultural activities, I mean, when you got here? There were lots of, you know, like you said, the symphony and the Playhouse and I guess the Art Center started later.
MRS. MARROW: About '52 the Art Center started.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, '52.
MRS. MARROW: To some degree. We were pretty busy raising four children, though, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, and working!
MRS. MARROW: And George was very involved in some of the early developments in the lithium process, COLEX operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Fact, he was the project ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Was he the director? The project director?
MRS. MARROW: I'm trying to think. John Googin was, of course, the brain.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But, oh, what is it when, you know, they try a process out before it becomes... ?
MR. MCDANIEL: Pilot. Pilot. The pilot process.
MRS. MARROW: He was head of the pilot plant. I remember his telling me he poured the first amalgam through the column.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: And spent many hours out there. (laughs) I tell you...
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure...
MRS. MARROW: Then, of course, before they got that far, he was... came home with mercury all over him. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he? Did he? Yeah.
MRS. MARROW: Many times... many times...
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure of that. Now, so... where did your kids go to school and what kind of activities were they involved in?
MRS. MARROW: My oldest daughter started school at Pine Valley because we were still living on Pacific Road then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Then, when we moved to the house on the lower end of East Drive. Charlotte, my second daughter, had not yet started school. She was born in '50.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: So when we moved in '54, she hadn't started school yet. So she and the boys -- I had two boys then -- she and the boys went to Glenwood Elementary and they all went to Jefferson Junior.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did they?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And, of course, all went to...
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was Jefferson Junior. Because it's not where it is now.
MRS. MARROW: No. It was... Well it... You know, the old high school was down in Jackson Square.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And when the new high school was built, that became Jefferson Junior.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. That's right.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. It wasn't torn down until after they built the new Jefferson.
MR. MCDANIEL: When they built the new Jefferson... Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: They all four graduated from Oak Ridge High.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: My oldest daughter started college at what was then Florida Presbyterian down in the St. Petersburg area, but it's now Eckerd College.
MR. MCDANIEL: Eckerd College.
MRS. MARROW: It hadn't been organized very long when she went down there. And she was down there two years and then she went out to California and she was a flower child for a little while. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? So this would have been in the '60s?
MRS. MARROW: In the 60s. In fact, it was '67.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. Because she graduated from high school in '65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: In '67 she... The summer of '67, she went out to California.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: And by '69, she'd decided she needed to get back into the Establishment so she went back to school at a small college, I think it was Merritt College in San Francisco proper -- she was living in Oakland at the time, but this was in San Francisco proper -- and made up some of her science and math classes and then she transferred to California-Berkley and she got her bachelor's and her Master's both from California-Berkley.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: My second daughter went to school at UT and graduated... no, she didn't graduate. She got married and had one quarter left because her senior year she had had to drop out for a quarter because of getting mononucleosis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: So, she married and then moved to Memphis while her husband finished his education on the GI Bill. He had been involved, I guess that must have been the Vietnam War at that time. Had to be, wouldn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: It had to be.
MRS. MARROW: I remember he was stationed... He was in communications and was stationed on one of those little islands out there in the Pacific.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But she finally got her degree around the time I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: Because when my children grew up, were almost grown, only had one still at home -- the youngest son and he was 15 -- I began to think about going back to college and getting a bachelor's degree, continuing my education, because that was a time when we were reaching middle age and when a lot of men...
MR. MCDANIEL: You needed to be able to do something if you needed to, didn't you?
MRS. MARROW: Yes, that's right. A lot of men, you know, got heart... dropped dead from heart trouble.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: I remember Ralph Levy did that. You remember ... know Joanne ...?
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't think so.
MRS. MARROW: Gailor? Yes, you do!
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah. Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: She was Joanne Levy.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right. Joanne Gailor.
MRS. MARROW: Ralph was her husband. He worked for George at the time, because at the time George was head of the Uranium Chemistry Department in the Development Division and he dropped dead on the tennis court.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, on the tennis court. And he was young.
MRS. MARROW: Oh, yeah, he was young. So I was thinking about, I have four children, I'd been doing... I'd already been doing publicity for non-profits and that kind of thing but I didn't have any credentials.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And I thought, well, there's a couple, two or three good reasons I should go back to school. One is that if anything happens to George I'll need to go to work. Because I didn't work during the time I was raising the children. So, I'll be better equipped for the job market.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And the other thing was that I was thinking, ok, I'm almost through child raising and what am I going to do with the rest of my life? I've got a lot of life left yet (laughs) and so if I go back to school at the very least I will expand my brain a little further and get some new information, contacts to make my life more ... the rest of my life more interesting. So, I started at Roane State with one course. Just to...
MR. MCDANIEL: Just to start.
MRS. MARROW: Just to dip my toe in the water, so to speak. And I really enjoyed it, didn't have any problems at all, so I started. I didn't... I guess 16 hours is full time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: I only carried 16 hours that one time because I was still keeping a house, still had one child at home, and I had a husband and so on. So, I was down at Roane State from ... the first year when I took the one course was '74 so I was down there until the winter... I guess it was the spring of '77.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did Roane State... they didn't have a place in Oak Ridge at the time. They were down in Harriman.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, I commuted down to Harriman and I decided to... I actually took Freshman Composition over again just to see... The Professor said, "I don't know what you're doing this for," and I said, "Well, I just want to see if I can do it." (laughs) While I was at Roane State, of course, there were other older students like myself but not many older than me because I was in my 50s, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly...
MRS. MARROW: So, I was very interested in women's rights and what was going on in that world so... They didn't have any programs for women so I approached Paul Goldsmith who was, I guess, he was community director at the time, about the possibility and he was enthusiastic about it and Joanne Thompson, who you may or may not know as a person who cares for injured birds on New York Avenue.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, no I didn't know that.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, but she was a counselor there at that time, at Roane State. And so, I initiated the women's studies programs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, they were not on the official curriculum but we had a series of programs throughout the year. One, I remember on Assertive Training and one about women running for office. We had Anna Belle Clement O'Brien come in as a speaker. I remember one of our students, as a result of all that, decided to run for office in Harriman, Kingston, one or the other... May have become a mayor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Who was it?
MRS. MARROW: I can't remember her name right now. Her first name was Ruby.
MR. MCDANIEL: In Harriman?
MRS. MARROW: Harriman or Kingston one or the other. I'm thinking it might have been ... maybe it was Harriman.
MR. MCDANIEL: Huh...
MRS. MARROW: But the name goes out of my head. That's the thing about being my age. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: So you went to Roane State.
MRS. MARROW: Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were there until you said, what '76? '77?
MRS. MARROW: Spring of '77...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: ...because I transferred to UT in the fall of '77... or it might have been... Oh, that's good enough. (laughter) With a National... Tennessee National Alumni Association scholarship, I transferred to UT and entered the College of Communications because I had decided that that was the way I was going. I was already doing that kind of work without, like I said, without any credentials. June Adamson was teaching there at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: She was teaching journalism there and I talked with her and she said, "Cleva, you don't want to go into ..." I was going to go into public relations and she said, "Cleva, you don't want to go into public relations, you'd have to lie!" (laughter) She said, "Why don't you go into the news and reporting sequence in journalism?" So I took her advice again and I graduated -- a quarter late -- but I graduated in, I guess, December, 1980 with my degree in journalism, news and reporting.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you were, at that point you were...56?
MRS. MARROW: Well, I was born in '22 and it was 1980 so that made me, what?
MR. MCDANIEL: 58?
MRS. MARROW: 58, yeah. So I took a little time off from school and started building a garden here in my yard. My neighbor was a perennial gardener.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And I got interested in that and started building a garden and got a call one day from the [Knoxville] News Sentinel. They wanted to know if I would start working for them to cover activities in Oak Ridge and Anderson County and I did. And I worked for them until about '87, I guess.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok. So, you covered Oak Ridge and Anderson County. Who else was covering Oak Ridge? Was there anyone else doing it?
MRS. MARROW: Bob Fowler's mother, Ruth Fowler. She was covering Anderson County.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: She was at all the county school board meetings just like I was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And Jeanette McKamey was covering city council, part of the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: For? For the News Sentinel?
MRS. MARROW: No, because I was covering it for the Sentinel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ruth Fowler was covering it... was she covering it for the Oak Ridger? Do you remember?
MRS. MARROW: I think it was. She was covering it for the Oak Ridger. And I don't know who Jeanette was...
MR. MCDANIEL: She may have been covering for the Clinton newspaper... The Clinton Courier.
MRS. MARROW: Must have been because I was, like I said, I was covering it for the Sentinel. Maybe she was covering for the Knoxville Journal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now were there things you didn't cover for the News Sentinel?
MRS. MARROW: Police, arrests, you know, crime ...and I didn't cover DOE unless it was related to city or county government.
MR. MCDANIEL: The city... So you were really city, county government is mainly what you did.
MRS. MARROW: Yes, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Who's covering DOE at that time?
MRS. MARROW: Frank...
MR. MCDANIEL: Frank?
MRS. MARROW: Well you know I know his name as well as any... (laughs) Still senior writer for them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep, yep... ok, we know who he is ... you and me neither one can remember his last name but that's ok.
MRS. MARROW: It'll come up later. (laughs) Munger. Frank Munger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. That's true. So you did that until about '87. You were still living in Oak Ridge; your kids were gone by then.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you involved in other activities in town? I mean, you know, groups?
MRS. MARROW: Not very much because I was one of those people that was really gung-ho so if there was anything going on in Oak Ridge, I was there covering it. I mean anything except police.
MR. MCDANIEL: And it was hard, I would imagine, it's hard to cover something -- cover a community for a newspaper and also be actively involved in the goings-on in that community, too.
MRS. MARROW: That's true. That was hard to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: You kind of had to keep your distance a bit.
MRS. MARROW: And the thing about it is, so much of the coverage of things that I covered was night meetings and night activities. And, at that time, we still didn't have the computers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And they were publishing in the evening, but their deadline was a morning deadline.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because it had to be typeset and everything.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, about 9 or 10 in the morning, I think, was the deadline.
MR. MCDANIEL: How did you deliver it?
MRS. MARROW: I dictated it on the telephone to a secretary over there. They had one of the secretaries come in early every day so she could take my dictation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really? My goodness!
MRS. MARROW: And I remember, I reported to the state editor over there was who I reported to -- was my immediate superior. And so, he told me one time that the editor said, "Where'd you find her?" said, "Are you paying her well enough?" (laughter) Said, "She's real productive!"
MR. MCDANIEL: He didn't want to lose you, did he? So you did that, you said, 'til about '87, is that correct?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. They decided at that point, that's when they established the Oak Ridge Bureau, the first Oak Ridge Bureau.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: And had the bureau office down there on Illinois Avenue and Frank and, I guess, Bob Fowler
MR. MCDANIEL: I think Bob...
MRS. MARROW: Yeah...had offices there. That's when Bob became the Oak Ridge editor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly... So what did you do then? '87?
MRS. MARROW: Well, I started about '83, while still working for the Sentinel, as a matter of fact, started working... involved at Ramsey House, the historic house built about 1797. It's ...won't be long 'til it's coming up on it’s... what would that be? '97, 2007... it's about 115 years now...
MR. MCDANIEL: 115 years, yeah.
MRS. MARROW: I served on -- well I volunteered for some time occasionally and then was elected to the board of directors in '83.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: That was my... (phone rings) Can we just pause?
MR. MCDANIEL: We can pause or we can just let it ring. Do you have an answering machine or do you need to get it?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, we'll just let it answer... let the answering machine answer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok... let's pause for a second and let it ring until it answers.
MRS. MARROW: And I'll think about what I want to say next.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure...
MRS. MARROW: We were talking about what I did next.
MR. MCDANIEL: (phone rings) Maybe it's somebody trying to check on you.
MRS. MARROW: Well, I did a lot of jobs over there and all of them were as a volunteer, but as a professional working as a volunteer. I did their public relations work for 25 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was at the Ramsey House.
MRS. MARROW: For 25 years and I got to know the Knoxville community almost better than Oak Ridge for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: But I, in addition to doing public relations for them, I acted as director of interpretation and education for several years and trained all the tour guides and that sort of thing. I developed, when I first started working over there they just had a tour. I developed an adjunct program to their tours where the children did hands-on activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: Crafts, Colonial crafts and that kind of thing like dipping candles, making butter all that kind of thing. Then I also initiated their first exhibition program. They had not had any ... in fact, they hadn't even had a professional... in fact, I hired the first professional director over there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: In my job as Head of Education.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And eventually became their chief grants writers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: There wasn't much I didn't do except serve as president and I was asked to do that and turned it down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I understand.
MRS. MARROW: In fact, I was active with them until 2006.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. MARROW: Uh-huh, when my husband became seriously ill ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really...
MRS. MARROW: ...and he needed my attention...
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: So I was... I gave up everything. Because also, during that period of time, in the, I guess it was in '89 or '90, I started... I became active at the Oak Ridge Arts Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: In '91, I guess, I was president of the arts guild there -- or maybe it was '90. By '92, anyway, I know I was serving on the Art Center board of directors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And then I served a term on... I did fundraising work for them with the Arts Council, United Fund drive...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly...
MRS. MARROW: ... I did their newsletter, I did public relations for them...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: ...and then I served a two year term as president, '96 through '98.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Part of '98... Of course the year would run from May to May.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: During that period of time, there were some programs that I am very... that are still going today. I'm really very happy to have had a part in the beginning. When I was involved with them first, they did not have any legislative advocacy programs going
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: So I got that going. I called Randy McNally (laughs).
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: We were wanting to do an additional... another addition, I would say, to the building, expansion.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So I called Randy McNally and asked him if he'd come up and visit with us at the Arts Center and let us talk to him a little bit about what was going on. So he did, he came. We showed him around and asked him if he could be of any help to us with the state government to get some funding to help with the expansion. So he advised me to do a writing campaign and we did that and so we were very fortunate that we got $20,000 on a line item in the state budget for helping with the expansion.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: I think the money came from his and Gene Caldwell's discretionary funds.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: They had some larger discretionary funds than they've had in recent years. Also, I began a corporate sponsorship program in which we asked... went out... I wrote, with the director's help -- Leah Marcum-Estes help - proposals for corporations to assist and support exhibitions and that kind of thing. During my presidency and some years after my presidency, we had our legislators to lunch every year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. MARROW: Even the years that were tight, we still had them come and talk about what we were trying to do and what we hoped to do there and what the program was like and encourage them to support the license plate program because that program is a major support for the arts in Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. MARROW: A lot of the funding for the Tennessee Arts Commission comes through that license plate program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: I guess another thing that I did while I was there was, and part of what I've spoken about already, having to do with development. In other words, development of funding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So then I decided that I thought we... I knew that other organizations did this and it had worked, to establish an annual fund drive every year. So we do that and it's still going today and has contributed to the program and still contributes to it. So, I served on the board about 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? Ok.
MRS. MARROW: And then could no longer serve.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But I continued my interest.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: Supporting ... The Arts Center has a really, really very, very good exhibition every year called the Open Show. It's a juried exhibition which means that an art expert or someone else comes in and selects the work that will be entered in the show.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MRS. MARROW: And we receive something over 300 -- quite a bit over 300 sometimes -- submissions. And about a hundred get hung in a show. So I decided to suggest to Leah Marcum-Estes, the Director, that we give an award for oil painting as one of the awards given during the Open Show, so I funded that. I was very, very honored -- just this past spring -- to be recognized as an inaugural... Let me back up for a minute.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: The Oak Ridge Arts Council decided this year to initiate a tribute to the arts in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So they had a banquet -- an awards banquet this past May and each of the member organizations, because it's a member organization for several... most of the arts organizations in Oak Ridge including the symphony, the chorus, Tennessee Writers, even.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. The Playhouse.
MRS. MARROW: The Playhouse and so on.
MR. MCDANIEL: I think there's like nine organizations.
MRS. MARROW: So each of the member organizations were asked to choose, to select a couple of people to be recognized for their contributions to the arts. I was very honored to be one of the first two from the Art Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, wow!
MRS. MARROW: I really did feel very, very honored to be an inaugural inductee I guess you would say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. It's nice to be... for people to show they appreciate your work, isn't it?
MRS. MARROW: I did appreciate that very much. Robert and Dot Hightower were the other two from the Art Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right... Ok, now, so you were involved in that -- you did mention that your husband got ill in 2006. Is that what you said?
MRS. MARROW: Yes. I was able -- very fortunately in 1998, I had decided and proposed to him and pushed to see that we did it -- that we got long-term care insurance. Because he had been diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy in 1994 and he -- I won't go into all the treatments and the visits we made to doctors and so on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But the long and short of it is that he had been treated with prednisone which it effected his optic nerve and also a half-rupture of his Achilles tendon but the other treatments were not advised for him because at the time he still had a fair amount of mobility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But once he got out of supervised therapy, he did not continue it on his own and so, although the neuropathy, I think, was arrested his mobility got worse and worse.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Because of atrophy. I mean, he moved from the bed to his desk to the dining room and that was the extent of his activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And then... this was like I'd say '94, '95. By '98, I had decided that he could very possibly become -- his mobility so bad he would either in a wheelchair and I wouldn't be able to get him out of the bed and all that kind of stuff so that's the reason we decided to go on and get the long-term care insurance. Which I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And then in 2006 he was diagnosed with last-stage COPD.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. MARROW: With heart blockage. Had two coronary arteries that were totally blocked and the third one was blocked partially in two places and Dr. Sharma said he could not have surgery; he could only treat him medically.
MR. MCDANIEL: How old was he at this time?
MRS. MARROW: At that time, that was in 2006, he was born in 1919.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: So he was 87 or 88?
MR. MCDANIEL: 87. Sure.
MRS. MARROW: He was 92 when he died in 2011.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: So, take five from that and I think you'll get 87. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: I think so.
MRS. MARROW: Anyway. Another aspect of the lung condition, which was because of... so the long and the short of it is that, he was an invalid, largely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Now he could still... he couldn't get up alone, but we could get him up and get him in a wheelchair even almost 'til he died.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But he was spending most of the time in the bed the last few months, anyway. He was in the hospital two or three, several times with pneumonia and in 2010, his pulmonologist, told me that when they cultured his sputum they found that he was... was infected with pseudomonas bacteria which is not... You can't kill it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. MARROW: All you can do is knock it back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And that eventually he would die from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: He told me, he said, "He may live on a year, he may live a month."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So he did -- he was in the hospital again in August of 2011. He came home from the hospital on, I think, the 18th of August and he died on the 16th of September, 2011.
MR. MCDANIEL: What... When did he retire?
MRS. MARROW: He retired, I guess, December 31, 1983.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: Because that was when the change over from Union Carbine to Martin Marietta occurred.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see... To Martin Marietta.
MRS. MARROW: And he decided to -- he was almost to retirement age, he was just under 65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, he could retire. He didn't want to go through all that, did he?
MRS. MARROW: If he would have waited until April... May, he would have been 65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: But he decided he didn't want to go through the transition.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So he retired at the end of '83. He was retired more than 25 years. '83 to...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Was he fairly active after retirement before he got sick?
MRS. MARROW: He was fairly active until the peripheral neuropathy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: In '83, he retired and he was ... he had back... serious back problems even then that hampered him to some degree. But he was mobile and he drove, played golf, and he went, you know, walked and all those things like that...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: ...until he got so sedentary that he lost the ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now let's see... What else do you want to tell me about. We just have a few minutes left. What else do you want to talk about? Anything?
MRS. MARROW: Well...
MR. MCDANIEL: You've been in Oak Ridge an awful long time. How have you see it change?
MRS. MARROW: Unbelievable. Not only Oak Ridge, but the entire area around us. I mean, I can remember when, you know the road between here and Clinton was a little bitty two lane road winding along the river, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And when ... how did we go? Of course the interstate was not even thought of yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: I guess we used to go the back way somehow and cut over to 25W to go into Knoxville and all that. Of course, all of that was country, it was all rural.
MR. MCDANIEL: Absolutely.
MRS. MARROW: The city limits of Knoxville, if I'm not mistaken, were about where the old Tremont Motel used to be and that would be this side. On the north side of -- what's the ridge that the towers are on?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah, Sharp's Ridge.
MRS. MARROW: Sharp's Ridge. So it was a little bit west of Sharp's Ridge just before you get to that big curve.
MR. MCDANIEL: See, I can remember when West Town Mall was a cow pasture.
MRS. MARROW: I can remember that.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean, I can remember that.
MRS. MARROW: When West Village... not West Village, West Hills community development which came after... I mean, before West Town Mall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: I remember when that was cow pasture.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Farragut was a pretty good drive, from Farragut to Knoxville, wasn't it?
MRS. MARROW: Exactly and it was very small, very small. Nothing like it is now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, Oak Ridge has stayed, you know, geographically, of course, it's kind of stayed the same and the population has stayed the same.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, we had a little bit of growth the last two or three years, though. I mean, we stuck at 27,000 for years and years and years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Have we made it to 30 yet?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. We did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: We made it to 30, finally. I don't know what it is now or whether it's held up, but we did. And of course, I've seen all the developments going west here in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: Back to Knoxville again, too. Because the city limits on the western end of Knoxville were at Weisgarber Road when we first came.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, sure.
MRS. MARROW: So all that development and all the development in Farragut. Even, although northwest didn't develop as fast as west, there's been a lot of northwest development since then, too, in Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: And all the west... Well, Emory Valley was the first development, additional development here. We never considered that but we did think, at the time West Hills was being built, we did think about moving over there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MRS. MARROW: Decided to stay in Oak Ridge instead.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: Well, of course, another big thing is the fact of the aging of the population here. I mean, when I... we came here, everybody was young. You didn't see a grandmother, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: I think I didn't meet anyone who was of grandmother age, even though as far as I know they weren't grandparents, it wasn't until I joined Grace Lutheran Church in '47, 1947.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. MARROW: And I met two of the people who were actually founders of the church, Frieda and Ray McCormick, and they were grandmotherly-fatherly age but they didn't have any children.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: But they were the first elderly people, really elderly people that I knew. There was one middle-aged couple that lived in the next K apartment from us when we were first here. They did have children. They were from a small town called Penn Yann, New York.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, I think it might have been somewhere in the Schenectady or Buffalo area.
MR. MCDANIEL: But now... everybody's elderly...
MRS. MARROW: Now, everyone is aging... Oh, something else I would like to talk about, too. I'm still active! I'm still active. I'm... At my church I'm a member of two new ministries that are just getting started, a Hispanic ministry and a mental illness ministry. I'm a lector at church. I'm active with League of Women Voters and American Association of University Women and with an organization called Women's Interfaith Group. This past year in January and February, I spent two months working the public relations for an international Women's Day conference.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: That we had in Oak Ridge on March 1st. Got sponsorships from WBIR...
MR. MCDANIEL: So you're still active in the community.
MRS. MARROW: I'm still active.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you're 90?
MRS. MARROW: One.
MR. MCDANIEL: 91, Ok.
MRS. MARROW: And I'm still driving myself.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: I'm just very, very, very fortunate. I had a couple of bad falls and didn't break anything so my bones, even at 91, aren't too porous! (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Not too brittle... Well, good. Well thank you so much for taking time to talk with us, telling us about your life here in Oak Ridge and in the area and all the things that you've done. Thank you for all the work you've and all you've contributed to our community.
MRS. MARROW: Well, thank you so much for talking with me. I was pleased to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Very good.
[End of Interview]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF CLEVA MARROW
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
August 10, 2013
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is August 10, 2013, and I am at the home of Cleva Marrow here in Oak Ridge. Mrs. Marrow, thank you for taking time to talk with us.
MRS. MARROW: Happy to have you.
MR. MCDANIEL: Let's start at the beginning. Why don't you tell me about where you were born and raised, something about your family.
MRS. MARROW: I was born and raised in western Kentucky in an area called the Jackson Purchase, which is extreme western part of the state, that little narrow part between the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Tennessee rivers, about an eight county area. Born on a farm in Graves County, Kentucky, which was near a farming village called Farmington.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: I lived there until I was eleven and went through sixth grade at the elementary school in the village. And then... This was during the Great Depression, of course.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, ma'am.
MRS. MARROW: My father had to quit farming actively himself when I was about six and had been working with a road paving contractor. And, in fact, he paved some of the first roads in Western Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year... if you don't mind me asking, what year were you born?
MRS. MARROW: 1922.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1922... Ok.
MRS. MARROW: August.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So he was working with a road paving company?
MRS. MARROW: Yes. And, just one way and another with the Depression he couldn't keep up with the payments on the farm so we lost the farm and moved into the county seat when I was eleven years old. I was very upset about the move. (laughs) And -- it wasn't a joke at the time, but it's a joke now, we had never had indoor plumbing so we had indoor plumbing for the first time, and I said, "I'm not going to use that. I'm never going to go there." (laughter) But, of course, I did later.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: We moved to town about six weeks before the city schools there hadn't finished. So, I was so determined that I wouldn't be held back, you know, a grade because of coming from a county, country school that I enrolled and I went to school the last six weeks of sixth grade at the elementary... yes, it was elementary still there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: So, I lived there until I graduated from high school, Mayfield High School as a salutatorian.
MR. MCDANIEL: Hold on just a second. I want to make an adjustment real quick. Ok, I'm sorry... So, we're going to pick it back up with, you said you had ... you graduated high school from Mayfield.
MRS. MARROW: Mayfield High School...
MR. MCDANIEL: As the salutatorian.
MRS. MARROW: Salutatorian of my class and that same year, I guess I... They had competitive contests in different subjects and that year I won first in literature in the state of Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well, I'm going to have to ask... hold on just a second. I'm sorry, I'm not happy with that either. We'll pick right back up with that same spot. I'll just put it back where it was. So, why don't you just start with, "I graduated from Mayfield High School..."
MRS. MARROW: I graduated from Mayfield High School as salutatorian of my class. That same year I won the contest, First in Literature in the state of Kentucky.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right. What did you have to do? Did you have to write an essay or...?
MRS. MARROW: Write essays and then took some tests for that. I would say living in town after growing up in the country was quite a change for me. And I don't think I ever thoroughly adjusted to it. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. MARROW: But during those years, too, my father had -- as the Depression deepened, the contracting company was having difficulties -- and he ended up working for the WPA.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And so, when I graduated from high school, my mom and I moved to Madison... no, Benton, Kentucky, which is near Land Between the Lakes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok, sure...
MRS. MARROW: We lived there because he was, by that time, now had changed again and he was working for Packard Motor Company up in Detroit making airplane engines. So, until I married, my mom and I lived together in an apartment in Benton and then moved to Paducah when I went to work at Kentucky Ordinance Works in 1942. I guess I skipped a little bit here.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok, we'll go back. Why don't you get a drink? Your voice is...
MRS. MARROW: It's really getting scratchy, isn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: A little scratchy...There we go. That's fine!
MRS. MARROW: It's going to continue to...
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok...
MRS. MARROW: Did that help any? Not much...
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, I think you'll be fine.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok. So…
MRS. MARROW: Oh, talking about going to Kentucky Ordinance Works is what it was. After I graduated high school, I got a scholarship to a small school in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, called Bethel Women's College. I always have been so -- I've thought about this so many times -- I've been so grateful to the efforts that my dad made for me. He was working for the WPA and he paid for my college education which, of course, the tuition was very low back in those years, which was '42, plus I did have a scholarship. Every month he sent a check for $33 to the college to pay for my two years there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: It was a junior college. I graduated in '42, and then that same summer I went to work for Kentucky Ordinance Works in Paducah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, $33 in '42, was nothing to sneeze at either. Doesn't sound like much, but it was a lot of money back then. Especially if you weren't making very much.
MRS. MARROW: That's right. It was a good little piece of what he was earning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: So, I've always been so grateful for those sacrifices he made for me to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you graduated from Bethel...
MRS. MARROW: In 1942.
MR. MCDANIEL: In '42 and you went to work?
MRS. MARROW: Went to work at Kentucky Ordinance Works.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what was that?
MRS. MARROW: That was a plant that made -- they were manufacturing TNT for conventional bombs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok, right. And was that in Paducah?
MRS. MARROW: That was just outside Paducah. In fact, later the gaseous diffusion plant took in that same land where the ordnance works was, west of Paducah a little bit. But it was while ... I worked as a secretary because I'd gotten a degree in... associate degree in business administration, worked as a secretary there. And it was at that time I met my husband because he was ... Out of college he had been hired by Atlas Powder Company and had trained at Weldon Springs, Missouri, and Kankakee, Illinois, and some of the other installations before coming to Paducah to run a TNT line.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MRS. MARROW: I met him at a cafeteria dance. They had the cafeteria dances on Saturday nights and I met him in, I guess, in '43, at a cafeteria dance. So we stared dating regularly and in the spring, late winter, I guess it was, of '44, he decided that ... He'd always loved ships and he decided that he was going to volunteer for the Navy. So he went up to St. Louis to do all of the interview work and the exams and that kind of thing and he passed everything except his medical because he had a double curvature of the spine and they said he'd never be able to handle deck duty. So, when he came back to Paducah, he was still looking to leave there so he had heard about the work in Oak Ridge and he decided to apply down here. He came down on May 5th and went to work on May 6th. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? In '44?
MRS. MARROW: In '44.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Well, I stayed in Paducah. We got unofficially engaged, but I stayed in Paducah because he had to wait until he could get married housing. But I visited him and saw Oak Ridge for the first time on the 4th of July weekend. I rode a bus 14 hours for an overnight trip. I had my first experience going through the guard gates and stayed overnight at the Guest House. I got my engagement ring and fainted in the jewelry store, all on that first day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: George was living in a dorm in West Village and had to wait 'til we could get housing and so... We waited until he knew that he had housing lined up before we set our wedding date which was August 31, 1944. We went on a week's honeymoon to Gatlinburg and then we came back to Oak Ridge at the end of the first week in September to a one-bedroom apartment on Waddell Circle.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, wow.
MRS. MARROW: So that's how we set up housekeeping.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it was '44...
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And the apartment was so new, the construction was so new the floors were sanded, but they still were not finished.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yep. So, we had no furniture and, in fact, even our bed linens -- a lot of them were wedding gifts -- had been in the trunk of the car and they were stolen while we were in Gatlinburg.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my!
MRS. MARROW: So we rented a rolling bed, two straight chairs and some linens from Roane-Anderson Company which was managing the city for the government at that time, and set up housekeeping in this little one-bedroom apartment. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness. Now, did he... where did he work? Did he work at Y-12?
MRS. MARROW: I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Your husband...
MRS. MARROW: ... the first nine months I was married...
MR. MCDANIEL: Your husband.
MRS. MARROW: Pardon me?
MR. MCDANIEL: Your husband? Where did he...?
MRS. MARROW: Oh, my husband worked at Y-12.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, he was hired by Tennessee Eastman.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. So, y'all moved... you're newly married, new town, new living arrangement, new everything.
MRS. MARROW: It was an exciting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right.
MRS. MARROW: I spent the first nine months learning how to cook, learning how to be married ... (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course. (laughs)
MRS. MARROW: ...and getting used to that. And then I started work in April of 1945 and I worked at Y-12 until Tennessee Eastman closed... 'til the government closed down the calutron operations and Tennessee Eastman left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what did you do at Y-12?
MRS. MARROW: I worked at one of the Alpha buildings and I was... the job was called, at the time, a spot checker. Now, we would call them a quality control technician probably. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: But actually what I did was to read the cubicle meters twice every shift and then I went back to the office, which was on the floor above the cubicle rooms, and crunched the numbers and did calculations and forwarded those on to the central office that was gathering statistics from all the operations from the calutrons. So my purpose was to read those meters and see what the production of U-235 was, really.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And then, when ... before Eastman left, I had had the opportunity to take a secretarial job and I was secretary to the production superintendent in Beta 3 which was, you know, one of the operations to further refine uranium.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: Speaking about that, knowing or not knowing what you were doing. Of course, I did not know what I was doing when I was reading those meters except that I was gathering information.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: But, sometime in the early period after we were married, my husband and I went over to the University of Tennessee library and he got a certain issue of the New York Times which talked a lot about Franklin Roosevelt's interest in the heavy water experiments that had been going on in Germany and some additional information, so we had a hint of what might be happening, but we never talked about it anymore even among... between the two of us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So I was still working for Waldo England as his secretary in Beta 3 when they decided to close down the calutron operation and Tennessee Eastman left and a lot of people including myself were out of a job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: Because employment went way down at that point. So I interviewed at X-10 and was hired in there to be secretary to the project engineer. Monsanto Chemical was the contractor at X-10 at the time. That was an exciting time, too. They were just beginning the planning to try to build a national laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And the project engineer was deep into that. So I had the experience of being involved in the very early stages of that planning and took notes for a lot of those meetings when they were planning.
MR. MCDANIEL: When they were figuring out how to turn it into a national laboratory.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And, in fact, I can remember very well they spoke of it as a national laboratory along the lines of the Bell Labs up near Chicago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: We lived in that apartment from... Well, let me go back for just a moment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: It turns out that when I went to work for Monsanto at X-10 I was pregnant, but I didn't know it at the time. So I worked until I was about six months in my pregnancy and then I resigned. And we lived in that apartment until shortly before my oldest daughter was born in '47.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: We moved to a B house on Pacific Road and we lived in that B house from '47 to 1954. And that was at the time when the city was... I mean the government was deciding to divest itself of the properties and sell them. If you lived in a cemesto, or, I guess, other housing you had first option for buying that property. But we already had one child. In fact, by '54, we had two and another one on the way, so we needed more room than a two-bedroom B house. So, we decided that we would use our priority to purchase a lot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: It was a bidding system for these lots up in the east end of town, which was the first land sold for private development. The area had formerly been flat-tops and this was the first area of flat-tops that were removed for the sale. And, A few lots were leased prior to the sale, but we waited. We bid on three lots up here and got our third choice.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really.
MRS. MARROW: I think that was 1954. So we moved out of the B house and lived in a house on the lower end of East Drive which was a newer rental development, that had been recently built and was being managed by Frrtz-Hays-Ballard and that's where we lived while we planned this house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: So we worked with an engineer and an architect to plan a lay-out... to do the plans for this house...
MR. MCDANIEL: This house that we're in today?
MRS. MARROW: This house that we are in. Moved in to it on Memorial Day, 1959 and have been here ever since! (laughter) Now, interesting enough, I'm sure we're not alone in this either, but in the early days of our marriage we thought we'd just be here until the war was over.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And instead, we just kept staying because it was a good place to live.
MR. MCDANIEL: By this time you had three kids... well, I mean, in the '50s. But you ended up with... how many? Did you just have the three children?
MRS. MARROW: I have four. I had a fourth while we were living in the house on the lower end of East Drive before we... He was 13 months old when we moved into this house. There was something I thought of a moment ago and I wanted to go back. You'll edit this, I know.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, we just go straight through. That's OK.
MRS. MARROW: Oh, I know what it was. It was the business of being here all this time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: We turned down about four opportunities to leave! (laughter) One... The first place we considered going was down to Peru to work for Anaconda Copper. We'd have been way up in the mountains and way different...
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow! When was this? About when was that?
MRS. MARROW: This was, let's see... This was probably around the time that Tennessee Eastman, or just before they left.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. Didn't know what you were going to do.
MRS. MARROW: No, but then we discovered that I was pregnant with my first child and so that knocked that out of the way because of amenities, probably, up on a mountain, down in Peru.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. MARROW: And another time, George was offered an opportunity to ... No, I guess the next one was that he looked into leaving Oak Ridge to work for Mobil Oil.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: In fact, they offered him a job and, in the end, we decided to stay here, again. Later, when Union Carbide had the contract for Y-12, they, at one point, offered him a job to go with the private Carbon Division. And he decided not to do that. Again, it was because we had a child that was in psychotherapy…
MR. MCDANIEL: Care...
MRS. MARROW: Behavioral treatment here at UT and we decided that moving wasn't a good move to make. The last time we had an offer and thought about leaving Oak Ridge was to go with the Consumer Products Division in Tarrytown, New York. George looked at the living conditions and so on up there and decided that wasn't a good move either, so we stayed here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But we had some great, great years. During all that time, as I said in talking with you before we started this, the filming. We were all young together; we were all from somewhere else. There were a lot of facilities that were very, very... made this a very good place to live. Neighborhood shopping centers, public cafeterias and a cafe, four or five movie theaters, bowling alleys. The fly in the ointment, of course, in those years was the rationing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly. But that was everywhere, though, wasn't it? I mean, rationing was everywhere.
MRS. MARROW: Rationing was everywhere. Here, too! I remember standing in line and with ... long lines, for meat and for other items. You got to the point where if you saw a line, you got in it. (laughs) But you didn't ever have any assurance they were going to still have any when you got to the front of the line.
MR. MCDANIEL: What were some of the things that were rationed, generally? You said meat...
MRS. MARROW: Fuel, gasoline was rationed. My husband, they had a kind of alphabetical system for gas rationing. I've forgotten what the lowest level was, but they used B, I know was for people that worked in the military industries.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And if you had a B rating you got eight gallons a month.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. Of course, automobiles themselves were rationed, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: Again, because of the work that George was doing he was able to have a car. And sugar. I think it was a half-pound per person a month, I believe. And coffee was rationed also. That was also rationed on an individual basis and I remember that what your ration that you received had to last you for five weeks.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: A lot of the other foodstuffs were rationed. Refrigerators were rationed. Bicycles were rationed. Tires were rationed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: Fats -- butter, shortening, and so on. Those were all rationed. So, as I joked -- half-joking -- with someone not long ago, as far as meats were concerned, you were lucky if you knew somebody that knew a black market butcher.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: And, strangely enough, we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MRS. MARROW: At one point.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MRS. MARROW: The couple that lived on... The K apartments were on the circle where we had our first home. The other one-bedroom apartment in that complex -- there were four apartments in it, two were two-bedroom and two one-bedroom -- the couple in the other one-bedroom apartment were a couple from Elizabethton, Tennessee, and they knew an ex-national... major league baseball catcher by the name of Hobe Brummit who was then a butcher over in Knoxville and they took me with them one time to see him and I once bought black market meat. And there was also a little butchery -- butcher shop -- on Hardin Valley Road, not far down Hardin Valley Road on the west side near where Pellissippi Community College is and we used to go over there, too, but that was legal it's just that it was a place that sometimes had a supply when the grocery stores here in Oak Ridge did not.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, was it all meats or was it just good meats. I mean, could you get like processed meats like bologna and things such as that?
MRS. MARROW: No, they were all rationed, too. As well as fresh cut meats.
MR. MCDANIEL: What about the cafeterias here in town. Were they able to get it before individuals were?
MRS. MARROW: Presumably they were, but I don't know for sure, but presumably they did have some priorities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, exactly...
MRS. MARROW: Because, you know, by '45, probably, the population here was 75,000.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. Yeah, there was a lot of people here.
MRS. MARROW: And a lot of people ate in the cafeterias. We did, too, part of the time. There was one cafe and it was located in what is now called the Capiello Building and I have an idea the Capiellos may have owned it. It was called the T&C and it was right in the section where, just to the left, in fact, the Epicurian may have included, I mean that space.
MR. MCDANIEL: Kind of in the middle there.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, but... The corner, there are two divisions there is so divided there. I know the first two and probably the third one, too, was part of the T&C. I'm pretty sure the Capiellos maybe owned them. But it was not government run like the cafeterias were. As you know, probably, we do still have one of the original movie theaters here. It was the Ridge Theater that is now the Oak Ridge Playhouse.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was the Center Theater.
MRS. MARROW: Was it the Center?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was the Center. The Ridge was the one that was down next to where Big Ed's is. But it was the Center Theater where the Playhouse...
MRS. MARROW: Ok, that's right. My mistake.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's ok!
MRS. MARROW: My memory's...
MR. MCDANIEL: But you had four! You had Jefferson, Grove, the Center and the Ridge.
MRS. MARROW: That's right. The boardwalks, I was just mentioning a minute ago the neighborhood shopping centers and, of course, neighborhood schools.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And you can't talk about Oak Ridge in the early days without talking about the mud, but at the same time a very nice feature was the fact that we did have those neighborhood centers and we had boardwalks through the woods that took us to those centers so that you could walk.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And, of course, you couldn't drive everywhere anyway because of the gas rationing and so on. We went in to, during those early years anyway; we went in to Knoxville almost every Saturday night. We were, of course, we were looking for furniture. Because, I mentioned what we started out with, so we had to shop for furniture.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: First thing we did was, we bought a bedroom suite at the old Miller's.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And I still have it. It's in the middle bedroom here at home here.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that was the one down on Henley Street?
MRS. MARROW: It was on Gay Street.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, Gay Street.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And so, it sat in the living room ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Go right ahead...
MRS. MARROW: ... while George finished the floors in the bedroom! (laughs) And then before he got the living room floors finished he had an emergency appendectomy and went down to the Oak Ridge Hospital which was, of course, as I'm sure you know, operated by the government and all the staff were -- at least the medical... the doctors were all military...
MR. MCDANIEL: Military... sure.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. So he had his ruptured appendix removed and, I don't remember how many days he was there, but a few days, then he just walked out of the hospital without it costing a single cent.
MR. MCDANIEL: So his appendix ruptured?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. But he didn't... they got to it very early ...
MR. MCDANIEL: That was one of the great things about living in Oak Ridge is the hospital, wasn't it?
MRS. MARROW: Yes, it was one of the great things about it. And there were other things... Another great thing about living in Oak Ridge was that coal was delivered to your door and it didn't matter too much that it was soft coal and belched smoke all over your laundry if it was hanging. But that was a great benefit, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And I don't remember... if we ever paid an electric bill up now to incorporation or the city, I don't remember it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember it.
MR. MCDANIEL: You probably didn't.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. So that was nice. And the fact that you never, as long as the city was gated you never, ever... We never locked a door.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Until the gates were opened. I remember that occasion very well, in 1949, too. I remember Jack Bailey. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Who was one of the celebrities who came.
MR. MCDANIEL: He did Queen for a Day.
MRS. MARROW: Queen for a Day. And Marie "The Body" McDonald.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. MARROW: And there was another one...
MR. MCDANIEL: Rob Cameron, Rob, he was the cowboy.
MRS. MARROW: There was another female, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, Marie "The Body" McDonald... Jeanette...? Was it Jeanette something or other? I should know. I made a movie about it, "The Day They Opened the Gates"...
MRS. MARROW: I know it's somewhere in my notes but right now it's gone out of my head... But anyway... That was a great day, in a way, and another day that we dreaded, in a way, because the fact that we had been such a secure community.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: So, you know, you make some trade-offs. Yeah, you make some trade-offs...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...And that was in 1949.
MRS. MARROW: '49, yeah. When did we incorporate finally?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was ...1959 is when the vote was taken, and then in '60 was when it actually...
MRS. MARROW: The first time it failed.
MR. MCDANIEL: The first time it failed, yes. And then it actually passed in '59 and, I think, in 1960 is when it officially started. You know, they spent a year getting everything together, getting it ready.
MRS. MARROW: Of course, other great things about those early days was the fact that we had a community... a symphony orchestra very early composed of many of the scientists, some others that were not, perhaps, but mostly the scientists that lived here. I think Waldo Cohn was the first director.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was. He was the first director.
MRS. MARROW: "Kahn"?
MR. MCDANIEL: "Cone"... I think it's "Cone"...Now, so did you and your...? Were you and your husband used to, you know, the cultural activities, I mean, when you got here? There were lots of, you know, like you said, the symphony and the Playhouse and I guess the Art Center started later.
MRS. MARROW: About '52 the Art Center started.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, '52.
MRS. MARROW: To some degree. We were pretty busy raising four children, though, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, and working!
MRS. MARROW: And George was very involved in some of the early developments in the lithium process, COLEX operation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Fact, he was the project ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Was he the director? The project director?
MRS. MARROW: I'm trying to think. John Googin was, of course, the brain.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But, oh, what is it when, you know, they try a process out before it becomes... ?
MR. MCDANIEL: Pilot. Pilot. The pilot process.
MRS. MARROW: He was head of the pilot plant. I remember his telling me he poured the first amalgam through the column.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: And spent many hours out there. (laughs) I tell you...
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure...
MRS. MARROW: Then, of course, before they got that far, he was... came home with mercury all over him. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he? Did he? Yeah.
MRS. MARROW: Many times... many times...
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure of that. Now, so... where did your kids go to school and what kind of activities were they involved in?
MRS. MARROW: My oldest daughter started school at Pine Valley because we were still living on Pacific Road then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Then, when we moved to the house on the lower end of East Drive. Charlotte, my second daughter, had not yet started school. She was born in '50.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: So when we moved in '54, she hadn't started school yet. So she and the boys -- I had two boys then -- she and the boys went to Glenwood Elementary and they all went to Jefferson Junior.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did they?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. And, of course, all went to...
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was Jefferson Junior. Because it's not where it is now.
MRS. MARROW: No. It was... Well it... You know, the old high school was down in Jackson Square.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And when the new high school was built, that became Jefferson Junior.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. That's right.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. It wasn't torn down until after they built the new Jefferson.
MR. MCDANIEL: When they built the new Jefferson... Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: They all four graduated from Oak Ridge High.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: My oldest daughter started college at what was then Florida Presbyterian down in the St. Petersburg area, but it's now Eckerd College.
MR. MCDANIEL: Eckerd College.
MRS. MARROW: It hadn't been organized very long when she went down there. And she was down there two years and then she went out to California and she was a flower child for a little while. (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? So this would have been in the '60s?
MRS. MARROW: In the 60s. In fact, it was '67.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. Because she graduated from high school in '65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: In '67 she... The summer of '67, she went out to California.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: And by '69, she'd decided she needed to get back into the Establishment so she went back to school at a small college, I think it was Merritt College in San Francisco proper -- she was living in Oakland at the time, but this was in San Francisco proper -- and made up some of her science and math classes and then she transferred to California-Berkley and she got her bachelor's and her Master's both from California-Berkley.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: My second daughter went to school at UT and graduated... no, she didn't graduate. She got married and had one quarter left because her senior year she had had to drop out for a quarter because of getting mononucleosis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: So, she married and then moved to Memphis while her husband finished his education on the GI Bill. He had been involved, I guess that must have been the Vietnam War at that time. Had to be, wouldn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: It had to be.
MRS. MARROW: I remember he was stationed... He was in communications and was stationed on one of those little islands out there in the Pacific.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But she finally got her degree around the time I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: Because when my children grew up, were almost grown, only had one still at home -- the youngest son and he was 15 -- I began to think about going back to college and getting a bachelor's degree, continuing my education, because that was a time when we were reaching middle age and when a lot of men...
MR. MCDANIEL: You needed to be able to do something if you needed to, didn't you?
MRS. MARROW: Yes, that's right. A lot of men, you know, got heart... dropped dead from heart trouble.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: I remember Ralph Levy did that. You remember ... know Joanne ...?
MR. MCDANIEL: I don't think so.
MRS. MARROW: Gailor? Yes, you do!
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah. Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: She was Joanne Levy.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right. Joanne Gailor.
MRS. MARROW: Ralph was her husband. He worked for George at the time, because at the time George was head of the Uranium Chemistry Department in the Development Division and he dropped dead on the tennis court.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, on the tennis court. And he was young.
MRS. MARROW: Oh, yeah, he was young. So I was thinking about, I have four children, I'd been doing... I'd already been doing publicity for non-profits and that kind of thing but I didn't have any credentials.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And I thought, well, there's a couple, two or three good reasons I should go back to school. One is that if anything happens to George I'll need to go to work. Because I didn't work during the time I was raising the children. So, I'll be better equipped for the job market.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And the other thing was that I was thinking, ok, I'm almost through child raising and what am I going to do with the rest of my life? I've got a lot of life left yet (laughs) and so if I go back to school at the very least I will expand my brain a little further and get some new information, contacts to make my life more ... the rest of my life more interesting. So, I started at Roane State with one course. Just to...
MR. MCDANIEL: Just to start.
MRS. MARROW: Just to dip my toe in the water, so to speak. And I really enjoyed it, didn't have any problems at all, so I started. I didn't... I guess 16 hours is full time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: I only carried 16 hours that one time because I was still keeping a house, still had one child at home, and I had a husband and so on. So, I was down at Roane State from ... the first year when I took the one course was '74 so I was down there until the winter... I guess it was the spring of '77.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did Roane State... they didn't have a place in Oak Ridge at the time. They were down in Harriman.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, I commuted down to Harriman and I decided to... I actually took Freshman Composition over again just to see... The Professor said, "I don't know what you're doing this for," and I said, "Well, I just want to see if I can do it." (laughs) While I was at Roane State, of course, there were other older students like myself but not many older than me because I was in my 50s, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly...
MRS. MARROW: So, I was very interested in women's rights and what was going on in that world so... They didn't have any programs for women so I approached Paul Goldsmith who was, I guess, he was community director at the time, about the possibility and he was enthusiastic about it and Joanne Thompson, who you may or may not know as a person who cares for injured birds on New York Avenue.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, no I didn't know that.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, but she was a counselor there at that time, at Roane State. And so, I initiated the women's studies programs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, they were not on the official curriculum but we had a series of programs throughout the year. One, I remember on Assertive Training and one about women running for office. We had Anna Belle Clement O'Brien come in as a speaker. I remember one of our students, as a result of all that, decided to run for office in Harriman, Kingston, one or the other... May have become a mayor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Who was it?
MRS. MARROW: I can't remember her name right now. Her first name was Ruby.
MR. MCDANIEL: In Harriman?
MRS. MARROW: Harriman or Kingston one or the other. I'm thinking it might have been ... maybe it was Harriman.
MR. MCDANIEL: Huh...
MRS. MARROW: But the name goes out of my head. That's the thing about being my age. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: So you went to Roane State.
MRS. MARROW: Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were there until you said, what '76? '77?
MRS. MARROW: Spring of '77...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: ...because I transferred to UT in the fall of '77... or it might have been... Oh, that's good enough. (laughter) With a National... Tennessee National Alumni Association scholarship, I transferred to UT and entered the College of Communications because I had decided that that was the way I was going. I was already doing that kind of work without, like I said, without any credentials. June Adamson was teaching there at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: She was teaching journalism there and I talked with her and she said, "Cleva, you don't want to go into ..." I was going to go into public relations and she said, "Cleva, you don't want to go into public relations, you'd have to lie!" (laughter) She said, "Why don't you go into the news and reporting sequence in journalism?" So I took her advice again and I graduated -- a quarter late -- but I graduated in, I guess, December, 1980 with my degree in journalism, news and reporting.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you were, at that point you were...56?
MRS. MARROW: Well, I was born in '22 and it was 1980 so that made me, what?
MR. MCDANIEL: 58?
MRS. MARROW: 58, yeah. So I took a little time off from school and started building a garden here in my yard. My neighbor was a perennial gardener.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And I got interested in that and started building a garden and got a call one day from the [Knoxville] News Sentinel. They wanted to know if I would start working for them to cover activities in Oak Ridge and Anderson County and I did. And I worked for them until about '87, I guess.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok. So, you covered Oak Ridge and Anderson County. Who else was covering Oak Ridge? Was there anyone else doing it?
MRS. MARROW: Bob Fowler's mother, Ruth Fowler. She was covering Anderson County.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: She was at all the county school board meetings just like I was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And Jeanette McKamey was covering city council, part of the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: For? For the News Sentinel?
MRS. MARROW: No, because I was covering it for the Sentinel.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ruth Fowler was covering it... was she covering it for the Oak Ridger? Do you remember?
MRS. MARROW: I think it was. She was covering it for the Oak Ridger. And I don't know who Jeanette was...
MR. MCDANIEL: She may have been covering for the Clinton newspaper... The Clinton Courier.
MRS. MARROW: Must have been because I was, like I said, I was covering it for the Sentinel. Maybe she was covering for the Knoxville Journal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now were there things you didn't cover for the News Sentinel?
MRS. MARROW: Police, arrests, you know, crime ...and I didn't cover DOE unless it was related to city or county government.
MR. MCDANIEL: The city... So you were really city, county government is mainly what you did.
MRS. MARROW: Yes, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Who's covering DOE at that time?
MRS. MARROW: Frank...
MR. MCDANIEL: Frank?
MRS. MARROW: Well you know I know his name as well as any... (laughs) Still senior writer for them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yep, yep... ok, we know who he is ... you and me neither one can remember his last name but that's ok.
MRS. MARROW: It'll come up later. (laughs) Munger. Frank Munger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. That's true. So you did that until about '87. You were still living in Oak Ridge; your kids were gone by then.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you involved in other activities in town? I mean, you know, groups?
MRS. MARROW: Not very much because I was one of those people that was really gung-ho so if there was anything going on in Oak Ridge, I was there covering it. I mean anything except police.
MR. MCDANIEL: And it was hard, I would imagine, it's hard to cover something -- cover a community for a newspaper and also be actively involved in the goings-on in that community, too.
MRS. MARROW: That's true. That was hard to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: You kind of had to keep your distance a bit.
MRS. MARROW: And the thing about it is, so much of the coverage of things that I covered was night meetings and night activities. And, at that time, we still didn't have the computers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And they were publishing in the evening, but their deadline was a morning deadline.
MR. MCDANIEL: Because it had to be typeset and everything.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, about 9 or 10 in the morning, I think, was the deadline.
MR. MCDANIEL: How did you deliver it?
MRS. MARROW: I dictated it on the telephone to a secretary over there. They had one of the secretaries come in early every day so she could take my dictation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really? My goodness!
MRS. MARROW: And I remember, I reported to the state editor over there was who I reported to -- was my immediate superior. And so, he told me one time that the editor said, "Where'd you find her?" said, "Are you paying her well enough?" (laughter) Said, "She's real productive!"
MR. MCDANIEL: He didn't want to lose you, did he? So you did that, you said, 'til about '87, is that correct?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. They decided at that point, that's when they established the Oak Ridge Bureau, the first Oak Ridge Bureau.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: And had the bureau office down there on Illinois Avenue and Frank and, I guess, Bob Fowler
MR. MCDANIEL: I think Bob...
MRS. MARROW: Yeah...had offices there. That's when Bob became the Oak Ridge editor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly... So what did you do then? '87?
MRS. MARROW: Well, I started about '83, while still working for the Sentinel, as a matter of fact, started working... involved at Ramsey House, the historic house built about 1797. It's ...won't be long 'til it's coming up on it’s... what would that be? '97, 2007... it's about 115 years now...
MR. MCDANIEL: 115 years, yeah.
MRS. MARROW: I served on -- well I volunteered for some time occasionally and then was elected to the board of directors in '83.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: That was my... (phone rings) Can we just pause?
MR. MCDANIEL: We can pause or we can just let it ring. Do you have an answering machine or do you need to get it?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, we'll just let it answer... let the answering machine answer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok... let's pause for a second and let it ring until it answers.
MRS. MARROW: And I'll think about what I want to say next.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure...
MRS. MARROW: We were talking about what I did next.
MR. MCDANIEL: (phone rings) Maybe it's somebody trying to check on you.
MRS. MARROW: Well, I did a lot of jobs over there and all of them were as a volunteer, but as a professional working as a volunteer. I did their public relations work for 25 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was at the Ramsey House.
MRS. MARROW: For 25 years and I got to know the Knoxville community almost better than Oak Ridge for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: But I, in addition to doing public relations for them, I acted as director of interpretation and education for several years and trained all the tour guides and that sort of thing. I developed, when I first started working over there they just had a tour. I developed an adjunct program to their tours where the children did hands-on activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: Crafts, Colonial crafts and that kind of thing like dipping candles, making butter all that kind of thing. Then I also initiated their first exhibition program. They had not had any ... in fact, they hadn't even had a professional... in fact, I hired the first professional director over there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. MARROW: In my job as Head of Education.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And eventually became their chief grants writers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: There wasn't much I didn't do except serve as president and I was asked to do that and turned it down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. I understand.
MRS. MARROW: In fact, I was active with them until 2006.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. MARROW: Uh-huh, when my husband became seriously ill ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really...
MRS. MARROW: ...and he needed my attention...
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: So I was... I gave up everything. Because also, during that period of time, in the, I guess it was in '89 or '90, I started... I became active at the Oak Ridge Arts Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: In '91, I guess, I was president of the arts guild there -- or maybe it was '90. By '92, anyway, I know I was serving on the Art Center board of directors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And then I served a term on... I did fundraising work for them with the Arts Council, United Fund drive...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly...
MRS. MARROW: ... I did their newsletter, I did public relations for them...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: ...and then I served a two year term as president, '96 through '98.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Part of '98... Of course the year would run from May to May.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: During that period of time, there were some programs that I am very... that are still going today. I'm really very happy to have had a part in the beginning. When I was involved with them first, they did not have any legislative advocacy programs going
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: So I got that going. I called Randy McNally (laughs).
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: We were wanting to do an additional... another addition, I would say, to the building, expansion.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So I called Randy McNally and asked him if he'd come up and visit with us at the Arts Center and let us talk to him a little bit about what was going on. So he did, he came. We showed him around and asked him if he could be of any help to us with the state government to get some funding to help with the expansion. So he advised me to do a writing campaign and we did that and so we were very fortunate that we got $20,000 on a line item in the state budget for helping with the expansion.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: I think the money came from his and Gene Caldwell's discretionary funds.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: They had some larger discretionary funds than they've had in recent years. Also, I began a corporate sponsorship program in which we asked... went out... I wrote, with the director's help -- Leah Marcum-Estes help - proposals for corporations to assist and support exhibitions and that kind of thing. During my presidency and some years after my presidency, we had our legislators to lunch every year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. MARROW: Even the years that were tight, we still had them come and talk about what we were trying to do and what we hoped to do there and what the program was like and encourage them to support the license plate program because that program is a major support for the arts in Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. MARROW: A lot of the funding for the Tennessee Arts Commission comes through that license plate program.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: I guess another thing that I did while I was there was, and part of what I've spoken about already, having to do with development. In other words, development of funding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So then I decided that I thought we... I knew that other organizations did this and it had worked, to establish an annual fund drive every year. So we do that and it's still going today and has contributed to the program and still contributes to it. So, I served on the board about 12 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? Ok.
MRS. MARROW: And then could no longer serve.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But I continued my interest.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: Supporting ... The Arts Center has a really, really very, very good exhibition every year called the Open Show. It's a juried exhibition which means that an art expert or someone else comes in and selects the work that will be entered in the show.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MRS. MARROW: And we receive something over 300 -- quite a bit over 300 sometimes -- submissions. And about a hundred get hung in a show. So I decided to suggest to Leah Marcum-Estes, the Director, that we give an award for oil painting as one of the awards given during the Open Show, so I funded that. I was very, very honored -- just this past spring -- to be recognized as an inaugural... Let me back up for a minute.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: The Oak Ridge Arts Council decided this year to initiate a tribute to the arts in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So they had a banquet -- an awards banquet this past May and each of the member organizations, because it's a member organization for several... most of the arts organizations in Oak Ridge including the symphony, the chorus, Tennessee Writers, even.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. The Playhouse.
MRS. MARROW: The Playhouse and so on.
MR. MCDANIEL: I think there's like nine organizations.
MRS. MARROW: So each of the member organizations were asked to choose, to select a couple of people to be recognized for their contributions to the arts. I was very honored to be one of the first two from the Art Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, wow!
MRS. MARROW: I really did feel very, very honored to be an inaugural inductee I guess you would say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. It's nice to be... for people to show they appreciate your work, isn't it?
MRS. MARROW: I did appreciate that very much. Robert and Dot Hightower were the other two from the Art Center.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right... Ok, now, so you were involved in that -- you did mention that your husband got ill in 2006. Is that what you said?
MRS. MARROW: Yes. I was able -- very fortunately in 1998, I had decided and proposed to him and pushed to see that we did it -- that we got long-term care insurance. Because he had been diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy in 1994 and he -- I won't go into all the treatments and the visits we made to doctors and so on.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But the long and short of it is that he had been treated with prednisone which it effected his optic nerve and also a half-rupture of his Achilles tendon but the other treatments were not advised for him because at the time he still had a fair amount of mobility.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But once he got out of supervised therapy, he did not continue it on his own and so, although the neuropathy, I think, was arrested his mobility got worse and worse.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Because of atrophy. I mean, he moved from the bed to his desk to the dining room and that was the extent of his activities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And then... this was like I'd say '94, '95. By '98, I had decided that he could very possibly become -- his mobility so bad he would either in a wheelchair and I wouldn't be able to get him out of the bed and all that kind of stuff so that's the reason we decided to go on and get the long-term care insurance. Which I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: And then in 2006 he was diagnosed with last-stage COPD.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. MARROW: With heart blockage. Had two coronary arteries that were totally blocked and the third one was blocked partially in two places and Dr. Sharma said he could not have surgery; he could only treat him medically.
MR. MCDANIEL: How old was he at this time?
MRS. MARROW: At that time, that was in 2006, he was born in 1919.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: So he was 87 or 88?
MR. MCDANIEL: 87. Sure.
MRS. MARROW: He was 92 when he died in 2011.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, ok.
MRS. MARROW: So, take five from that and I think you'll get 87. (laughter)
MR. MCDANIEL: I think so.
MRS. MARROW: Anyway. Another aspect of the lung condition, which was because of... so the long and the short of it is that, he was an invalid, largely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: Now he could still... he couldn't get up alone, but we could get him up and get him in a wheelchair even almost 'til he died.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: But he was spending most of the time in the bed the last few months, anyway. He was in the hospital two or three, several times with pneumonia and in 2010, his pulmonologist, told me that when they cultured his sputum they found that he was... was infected with pseudomonas bacteria which is not... You can't kill it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. MARROW: All you can do is knock it back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: And that eventually he would die from it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure...
MRS. MARROW: He told me, he said, "He may live on a year, he may live a month."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So he did -- he was in the hospital again in August of 2011. He came home from the hospital on, I think, the 18th of August and he died on the 16th of September, 2011.
MR. MCDANIEL: What... When did he retire?
MRS. MARROW: He retired, I guess, December 31, 1983.
MR. MCDANIEL: Ok.
MRS. MARROW: Because that was when the change over from Union Carbine to Martin Marietta occurred.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see... To Martin Marietta.
MRS. MARROW: And he decided to -- he was almost to retirement age, he was just under 65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, he could retire. He didn't want to go through all that, did he?
MRS. MARROW: If he would have waited until April... May, he would have been 65.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: But he decided he didn't want to go through the transition.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: So he retired at the end of '83. He was retired more than 25 years. '83 to...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Was he fairly active after retirement before he got sick?
MRS. MARROW: He was fairly active until the peripheral neuropathy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: In '83, he retired and he was ... he had back... serious back problems even then that hampered him to some degree. But he was mobile and he drove, played golf, and he went, you know, walked and all those things like that...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right...
MRS. MARROW: ...until he got so sedentary that he lost the ...
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now let's see... What else do you want to tell me about. We just have a few minutes left. What else do you want to talk about? Anything?
MRS. MARROW: Well...
MR. MCDANIEL: You've been in Oak Ridge an awful long time. How have you see it change?
MRS. MARROW: Unbelievable. Not only Oak Ridge, but the entire area around us. I mean, I can remember when, you know the road between here and Clinton was a little bitty two lane road winding along the river, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: And when ... how did we go? Of course the interstate was not even thought of yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: I guess we used to go the back way somehow and cut over to 25W to go into Knoxville and all that. Of course, all of that was country, it was all rural.
MR. MCDANIEL: Absolutely.
MRS. MARROW: The city limits of Knoxville, if I'm not mistaken, were about where the old Tremont Motel used to be and that would be this side. On the north side of -- what's the ridge that the towers are on?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah, Sharp's Ridge.
MRS. MARROW: Sharp's Ridge. So it was a little bit west of Sharp's Ridge just before you get to that big curve.
MR. MCDANIEL: See, I can remember when West Town Mall was a cow pasture.
MRS. MARROW: I can remember that.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean, I can remember that.
MRS. MARROW: When West Village... not West Village, West Hills community development which came after... I mean, before West Town Mall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: I remember when that was cow pasture.
MR. MCDANIEL: And Farragut was a pretty good drive, from Farragut to Knoxville, wasn't it?
MRS. MARROW: Exactly and it was very small, very small. Nothing like it is now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, Oak Ridge has stayed, you know, geographically, of course, it's kind of stayed the same and the population has stayed the same.
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, we had a little bit of growth the last two or three years, though. I mean, we stuck at 27,000 for years and years and years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Have we made it to 30 yet?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah. We did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: We made it to 30, finally. I don't know what it is now or whether it's held up, but we did. And of course, I've seen all the developments going west here in Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: Back to Knoxville again, too. Because the city limits on the western end of Knoxville were at Weisgarber Road when we first came.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, sure.
MRS. MARROW: So all that development and all the development in Farragut. Even, although northwest didn't develop as fast as west, there's been a lot of northwest development since then, too, in Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. MARROW: And all the west... Well, Emory Valley was the first development, additional development here. We never considered that but we did think, at the time West Hills was being built, we did think about moving over there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MRS. MARROW: Decided to stay in Oak Ridge instead.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MRS. MARROW: Well, of course, another big thing is the fact of the aging of the population here. I mean, when I... we came here, everybody was young. You didn't see a grandmother, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MRS. MARROW: I think I didn't meet anyone who was of grandmother age, even though as far as I know they weren't grandparents, it wasn't until I joined Grace Lutheran Church in '47, 1947.
MR. MCDANIEL: Uh-huh...
MRS. MARROW: And I met two of the people who were actually founders of the church, Frieda and Ray McCormick, and they were grandmotherly-fatherly age but they didn't have any children.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. MARROW: But they were the first elderly people, really elderly people that I knew. There was one middle-aged couple that lived in the next K apartment from us when we were first here. They did have children. They were from a small town called Penn Yann, New York.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. MARROW: Yeah, I think it might have been somewhere in the Schenectady or Buffalo area.
MR. MCDANIEL: But now... everybody's elderly...
MRS. MARROW: Now, everyone is aging... Oh, something else I would like to talk about, too. I'm still active! I'm still active. I'm... At my church I'm a member of two new ministries that are just getting started, a Hispanic ministry and a mental illness ministry. I'm a lector at church. I'm active with League of Women Voters and American Association of University Women and with an organization called Women's Interfaith Group. This past year in January and February, I spent two months working the public relations for an international Women's Day conference.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. MARROW: That we had in Oak Ridge on March 1st. Got sponsorships from WBIR...
MR. MCDANIEL: So you're still active in the community.
MRS. MARROW: I'm still active.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you're 90?
MRS. MARROW: One.
MR. MCDANIEL: 91, Ok.
MRS. MARROW: And I'm still driving myself.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. MARROW: I'm just very, very, very fortunate. I had a couple of bad falls and didn't break anything so my bones, even at 91, aren't too porous! (laughs)
MR. MCDANIEL: Not too brittle... Well, good. Well thank you so much for taking time to talk with us, telling us about your life here in Oak Ridge and in the area and all the things that you've done. Thank you for all the work you've and all you've contributed to our community.
MRS. MARROW: Well, thank you so much for talking with me. I was pleased to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Very good.
[End of Interview]